CHON World

By Ian Page We have talked about the EV effect on countries that import or export fossils, but this is an interesting thought about local benefits. The top line is that 2/3 of fuel costs leaks out of the region, resulting in lower incomes and GDP. Full EV's would result in about half the cost, and about half the money being saved/returned to the local economy. I don't follow all the arguments but pretty obviously generating the energy you use locally at zero marginal cost is a very good thing! https://cleantechnica.com/2021/08/30/keep-fuel-dollars-local-by-switching-to-evs/

By Ian Page https://advisory.kpmg.us/articles/2021/limits-to-growth.html Section 4 has the conclusions and discussion. Two scenarios align closely with observed factors, the one based on rapid technological developments is however quite optimistic (If you take my view that technology developments in any given area are an S curve). Sustainable world is not a good match. There is less than a decade to choose to fit a desirable scenario.

By Ian Page https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048733321000950 The paper has a good summary  "Highlights A comprehensive granular account of the rate of technological change. Predicted improvement rates for 1757 domains containing 97.2% of US patent system. Improvement rates are not uniformly distributed across and within categories. Fastest improving domains are predominantly software-related. Online system for searching domains and improvement rates based on keywords." My main concern was that it's measuring technology improvement rates, presumably some measure of performance, rather than some measure of impact. My thought was that making excel go 200% faster, has little impact on the world while improving the extraction rate of copper from ores from 0.3% to 0.33% increases the amount of the critical material copper by 10% and has major impacts on the market price and usage. This leads to concluding  that patents in software (where it's easy but may...

 By Ian Page Form Energy is a startup with backing from Gates and a large iron producer, with a particularly impressive group of people.  Otherwise I would have ignored the series of announcements. They claim to have made an iron air battery, with very good cycle numbers, and an ability to deliver energy for 16 days at a very low cost. The basic idea is to allow air to react with iron making rust and electricity, and then recharge the battery by forcing the rust back to iron with electricity. These components are very cheap. There's very little actual information about this. It does not use lithium or nickel. There are many issues that need to be resolved in such a battery How fast does the oxygen react with iron?   Iron in tiny particles reacts so fast that it catches fire in air, but normal lumps take time as the air has to fight its way through a layer of iron oxide. Stability of the iron anode.  Iron and iron oxide have different crystal structures. At the macr...